Pay for Sendgrid (100 / day for free is not enough) VS set up your own email server?
For own email server, do you not get flagged a lot as spam ?
I wouldnt say that. however setting uo your own mail server is a lot of work, as you have to abide a lot of “security” rules (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, rDNS). Additionally some hosters reuire you to apply for port 25 to be unblocked (e.g. hetzner)
The set up isn’t actually hard at all, if you understand the concepts. Keeping off blacklists is the hard part, as big providers often block entire IP ranges due to one bad actor.
I’m using mailjet with 200 / day free
I’m piggybacking off of a mail server for a domain I run. My instance is small though so I’m not worried about a flood of emails.
Not sure if you’re hosting on AWS (if yes, free for the first 62k/month), else the $0.10/1k/month shouldn’t be too bad - https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/
From my past experience with Sendgrid, it is trash, most of their shared IPs have poor reputation anyways, had lots of issues with them.
Running your own email server might be a good learning experience, a quick search brought up this all-in-one container solution - https://mailu.io/2.0/
Messing about with Postfix directly could be a painful experience, but yet another possibility.
Either way, new IPs will probably take some time to warm up, so don’t expect full deliverability for the first few days/weeks.
You should check that your cloud provider doesn’t block outgoing smtp traffic - iirc digital ocean and GCP do block.
If you are hosting public instances where you’re sending emails out, you’ll probably want to pay for transactional email providers like sendgrid as you’ve flagged. Sending large amount of email out yourself while ensuring high deliverability rating is doable, but will often result in more headache than cost savings.
